As data centers increase server density, including but not limited to blade servers, server deployment and management continues to be a resource-intensive task. For example, a server administrator typically must log on to each server and individually configure each server for communicating on the network. Oftentimes the server administrator has to input the same or only slightly different information for each server. Accordingly, this can be an inefficient, time-consuming, costly, and potentially error-prone repetitive task.
Although server-image deployment tools may be used to pre-configure each server, this commonly necessitates both the configuration information being known at deployment and that the initial configuration information cannot change over time. Neither of these restrictions is desirable. Some switch-to-switch protocols (e.g., GVRP) do not always readily extend to network-edge devices such as servers. Even if these switch-to-switch protocols could be used with servers, it is not always known how to correctly configure the server's operating system to communicate with the network efficiently in the absence of standards necessary for network protocols. Further, such switch-to-switch protocols communicate what configurations are available, not which configurations should be used (e.g., which VLANs are available, not which VLAN to use). Accordingly, these implementations do not readily allow the benefits of practical I/O virtualization to be extended from the switch-centric view of the network to a cooperating-server inclusive view of the network.